


The Cave

by ashintuku



Series: your faith in shreds it seems [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Excessive amounts of symbolism, Gen, Minor Canon Typical Violence - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-23
Updated: 2012-10-23
Packaged: 2017-11-16 21:13:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/543864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashintuku/pseuds/ashintuku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was August 12 when Things Happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cave

_“And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and everyone shall eat the flesh of his friend in the siege and in the desperation with which their enemies and those who seek their lives shall drive them to despair.”_

                                                                                                                       -Jeremiah 19:9

 

And so it was that Famine came, and the people starved.

 

They starved for food, and for water. They starved for oxygen, and for sleep. Famine came and starved the people of love and laughter, joy and sorrow, friendship and attention. Famine starved them of sex; Famine starved them of literature. Famine starved the people of intelligence, education, music, culture, and society. Famine took it all away, holding it all in her thin, white arms, and it crumbled into ashes to her feet.

 

Famine came, and life became dust.

 

~+~

 

Every year since her childhood, her GrandmèreCharbonneau had come to Beacon Hills from a little town in France Lydia had never been to. And every year since her childhood, Lydia was made to speak in her Grandmère’s tongue because the old woman could not speak a word of English to save her Christian soul.

 

French was not a difficult language, not for the talented Lydia Martin. Her mother had sung it to her as an infant, and she would babble in broken French and English once she could get her flapping lips around words.

 

Her father had hated that Lydia and her mother, Evangelie, would speak to each other in French because he could not understand a lick of the romantic language and had thought they were whispering secrets without his realizing. It was not until her parents began the process of divorce that Lydia would complain about her father in her mother’s native tongue, using the most vicious words a fourteen-year-old girl could think of and crying into her pillow because the arguing reached the safe haven of her bedroom.

 

But it was the summer after Jackson had died and come back to life (twice) that Lydia’s mother told her daughter that her Grandmère was coming sometime at the end of August or beginning of September, and she had better be ready to keep her company and introduce her boyfriend.

 

This was, of course, a nightmare.

 

“ _Maman_!” Lydia cried out indignantly (or rather whined, but whining was such an unattractive feature that Lydia tried her very best not to think of herself as _whining_ ), “Why in the world would I want to do _that_? Grandmère will only embarrass me and ask Jackson when he’s going to propose to me and give her great-grandchildren! You know that’s what she’ll do; it’s what she did with Phillip in middle school.”

 

“Jackson has to meet her at some point – you managed to avoid it last year, but this year he _has_ to meet her. Grandmère is not as strong as she used to be; give her just this one little joy, hm?”

 

Lydia huffed, blowing her bangs out of her face and crossing her arms. She stood before her mother in the sleeping clothes she wore when she was not expecting Jackson to come over – a ratty T-shirt and a pair of Jackson’s boxers that she’d stolen ages ago and hadn’t bothered to let him know she had. Her hair was a royal mess, tangled and knotted and looking like she’d shoved her head into the washing machine, and dark lines dragged under her eyes.

 

Her mother didn’t even notice her usually pristine daughter’s dishevelled appearance, for she was looking over documents and bills, gold-frame glasses perched on her nose and dark blonde hair tied back in a Very Professional Bun.

 

Staring hard at her mother, eyes narrowed and mind going through all the possible ways to get out of the situation the young girl found herself in, Lydia sighed and dropped her arms from their crossed position, tugging at a ragged curl in frustration.

 

“Oh, _fine_ , I suppose she can meet Jackson. But Jackson can’t speak any French, so it’s going to be horrible and uncomfortable and awkward, and when you go to complain about it later that night I am simply going to say ‘I told you so, I told you so, I told you so’.”

 

(It was an inside joke that Lydia and Evangelie used to say to one another, when Lydia’s father wasn’t paying attention to them and they were conversing in French. Grandmère tended to say everything in threes, and so mother and daughter liked to copy her every once in a while. Since the divorce, however, they hadn’t played their game as often. Sometimes Lydia missed it.)

 

“Of course, sweetheart,” Evangelie murmured, shuffling the bills and bringing one up close so that she glare down her nose at it, as if feeling the need to be haughty towards whatever numbers were being shown. Lydia waited another moment to see if her mother would say anything more, maybe even continue with their game, but the woman was fully immersed in things Lydia could figure out in ten minutes, given the time.

 

She sighed, shaking her head and making her way to the kitchen. Grabbing a glass from the cupboard, she took out the jug that filtered water, pouring in half a glass and keeping the fridge door open with her hip. The chill of the door settled into her pale skin, centering on her hip and slowly spreading up her side towards her ribs and down her thigh towards her knee. Carefully putting the jug back onto its shelf, in the exact spot it was before (for Lydia liked order in everything, as order was simple and order never fought), she moved to grab her glass.

 

She made her way back out of the kitchen, towards the stairs that would lead her into her room and the only place in the entire house that felt like hers. Her mother’s voice, however, stopped her.

 

“Have you eaten yet?”

 

Lydia froze on the first step, staring down at her feet with the perfect pedicure and the flawless light pink nail polish she had chosen at the spa two weeks ago as a treat to herself for dealing with life’s severe bullshit. It was not a hard question; it wasn’t even worth ruminating on as she was.

 

And yet she almost felt choked, trying to quickly think of an answer that would please her mother.

 

“…I’m going out to breakfast with Allison today! She’s leaving this weekend with her dad on some kind of…extended family bonding trip or whatever, so we thought it’d be good to meet up sooner rather than later, as she’ll be gone the whole summer.”

 

“Alright, sounds good. Have a good time!”

 

“I always do!”

 

Waiting another moment to make sure her mother wouldn’t decide to pay attention to her _now_ , Lydia quickly bounded up the stairs and shut her door as quietly yet as firmly as she could manage, hand pressed against the wood and heart thrumming steadily and sickly in her throat.

 

Her mouth felt dry.

 

Forcing herself to take a swallow from her water, she walked over to her desk and set the glass on the coaster she had there for such a purpose. Picking up her phone, she pushed a button to unlock it, sliding the greeting screen up with a delicate finger and going to her contacts, picking ‘Allison Argent’.

 

_Hey, Allison, did you want to meet up for breakfast? We could go to that one little diner you seem to like. We need to talk before you disappear._

 

Hesitating for only a moment, Lydia hit ‘send’ and tossed her phone onto her bed, going over to her desk and looking at a list of books she had prepared for her summer reading at the beginning of second semester. Biting her bottom lip thoughtfully, she noticed that she had chosen five different variations of _Little Red Riding Hood_ to warm up.

 

“I’ll go to the library this afternoon,” she murmured, narrowing her eyes. Her phone sang its alert, and the strawberry-blonde turned back to it, picking it up and looking at Allison’s reply.

 

_okay_

 

Lydia sighed, rolling her eyes and replied with a time, telling the other girl to meet her in an hour, before putting aside her phone again and moving towards her closet.

 

She opened the double-doors with a flourish, looking at her collection of outfits and thumbing through them. She’d have to stick to summer colours, because it _was_ summertime, so she skipped the entire left side of the closet which was dedicated to fall and winter outfits. She picked out a nice shirt with some kind of floral print on it, tugging down the jeans she had bought a few days ago on an impromptu trip to the mall with her mother.

 

(She had needed the moment of normality, because Jackson had been ignoring her texts again, she was still having nightmares about Peter Hale, and she couldn’t look anyone in town in the eye just yet. This was partly because of her damaged reputation, but mostly it was because she didn’t know who was what anymore, and that scared her. That well and truly scared her.)

 

Placing her clothes onto her bed, along with the shoes she’d picked out once she’d settled on a light sweater to keep out any residue spring-chill from the air, the teenager moved to the bathroom.

 

She stared at the shower taps with careful eyes, gaze trailing down to the porcelain tub, moving to the semi-opaque shower curtains and following the tiles that patterned the inner wall, counting each dark blue square when she found it. Trailing somewhat shaking fingers along the edge of the tub, she knelt down on the cold ground and pushed against the bottom of the bathtub, feeling soap scum and a lingering hair or two that her mother hadn’t been able to swipe when she did a quick clean-up after her shower last night.

 

Inhaling deeply, Lydia forcefully made herself exhale as slowly as possible, telling herself that the tub was real and that she would not see charred Peter Hale crawling out of imaginary cracks should she take a shower.

 

It was her routine.

 

She stood up after a moment, tugging off her T-shirt and the boxers, throwing them into her hamper (her mother and she had separate hampers, and this was most definitely for the best; Lydia had had to wash out so much blood the night Jackson came back to life, eyes glowing electric blue and a howl ripping from his throat) before turning back to the shower and twisting the knob to hot. Closing the curtain, she tugged up the tab that would make the water go from the tap to the showerhead, stepping in once steam started to leak out from the cracks between curtain and wall, and stepping under the scalding water.

 

Closing her eyes, Lydia hugged herself tight and forced herself to relax and go through routine.

 

She started with body soap, lathering it into a loofah and cleaning her arms, chest and stomach very carefully. She moved onto her hips and legs, scrubbing behind her knees and cleaning the small of her back as best as she possibly could. Cleaning up her neck, she grabbed the face cloth that she kept in the shower, hanging on the plastic pole built into the wall, and rubbed at her face, scrubbing away a feeling of dirt and claws and blood.

 

Lydia did her feet last, and she rubbed them until they were a screaming, raw red. Only then would it feel like the dirt and the worms were off of her skin.

 

After she was finished, the math genius moved on to her hair, running her fingers through it carefully, then running a shower comb through it just as carefully to untangle the knots and wild twists in the strawberry-blonde strands. She would then slowly massage shampoo into her scalp, washing it out with methodic movements; conditioner would follow, washed away in the same manner, and then she would repeat the process once more to make sure that she had managed to clean and scrub and rinse out everything. She spent the last five minutes of her shower fully relaxing, head tipped back under the spray, eyes closed, and senses closed to everything but the splatter of water and her breathing.

 

The whole process took about twenty minutes.

 

Keeping her eyes closed, Lydia reached back to turn off the shower, pulling aside the curtain and holding herself very still to make sure she couldn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. After a quiet minute or two, she opened her eyes and looked around her completely ordinary bathroom, breathing out a quiet sigh and stepping out onto the bathroom mat, grabbing her towel and then her bathrobe, wrapping her towel around herself and slipping on the bathrobe. She toweled off her hair, taking a comb and running it through the long locks quickly, giving herself a thoughtful look in the mirror as she contemplated what to do with her hair that day.

 

“Maybe I’ll tie it up,” she murmured, carding her fingers through the wet strands, the motion soothing and repetitive. “I haven’t for a while, and I don’t want to start repeating hairstyles…mm.” She pressed her lips together in a thoughtful look, lips pouting somewhat, before nodding and grabbing her hairdryer. “Tying it up it is.”

 

Ten minutes later, Lydia was dressed, hair dried and curled and tied up to perfection, and face made up to make herself look healthy and pretty and not like she was sleep deprived. She shuffled through her jewellery box – the only messy thing in her possession, and that was quite alright, thank you – picking out a ring and a bracelet, before grabbing her purse and her phone, making her way downstairs.

 

Evangelie was still at her papers and her bills, a cup of coffee now sitting beside her and cheerfully steaming. Lydia knew for a fact that her mother wouldn’t touch the coffee until it had gone stone cold, because that was the only way Evangelie Charbonneau-Martin could drink her coffee, and the only reason why she poured it while it was still hot was because she liked the way the roasted beans, French vanilla creamer, and two half teaspoons of sugar smelled all mixed together.

 

She knocked on the archway into the dining room to catch her mother’s attention, raising an eyebrow when the woman finally glanced up over the rim of her glasses. As usual, her mother only saw her at her best. Lydia wondered if that was on purpose.

 

“I’m leaving now.”

 

“Alright,” Evangelie nodded, adjusting her glasses and smiling at her daughter in a not-quite-there manner. “Could you bring me back a muffin if you pass by _Chloe’s Café_ on your way back home? I just need something to munch; I’d be so grateful, sweetheart.”

 

“Of course, _maman_ ,” Lydia said with a small smile, meant to placate. Evangelie smiled back, meant to respond, before she turned back to her Very Important Work and Lydia left the house without another distraction.

 

Walking briskly down the street, for she did not have a car (as she had not found one that suited her just yet – and why bother, when she had a boyfriend to drive her everywhere?), Lydia held her head high and smiled as she passed by her neighbours, letting them know that she was completely within her own mind and was the exact same Lydia Martin that she had always been.

 

She arrived at the diner just in time for Allison to pull up into a parking spot.

 

Lydia watched as Allison Argent climbed out of her car, taking a good look at the girl she had called her best friend since she first met her who she hadn’t seen in weeks.

 

She looked more drawn than she once had: her skin paler and her shoulders slumped. Long, curly brown hair had been hacked short, and she kept it up with the use of bobby pins and hair clips that didn’t stand out. She was wearing a sweater with blue and grey stripes, the sleeves pulled down over her knuckles, jeans and sneakers. Her leather jacket was the only thing that could be considered a true accessory, and it was in that moment Lydia remembered that Allison’s mother had died, and Allison had gone after all things supernatural in an attempt at revenge, which failed when her cancerous grandfather threw everything into hell in a blender.

 

“You know, if you’d like, I have just the tip to hide those bruises under your eyes that’ll make people stop asking annoying questions,” Lydia said without prompting, hooking her arm into Allison’s and dragging her into the diner and towards the back where the bathroom was located. “Also, I love your haircut, but you need to do more with it – can you do cute little French braids? That’d be perfect; you’d look sophisticated and mature while also being fashionable.”

 

Allison followed her wordlessly, bright brown Bambi eyes staring at her in surprise and confusion, before shrugging helplessly. “I – I don’t really know. I mean, I just kind of…hacked off my hair. I don’t even know why I did it.”

 

Lydia sighed theatrically, shaking her head and pushing her towards the bathroom mirrors, turning the older girl to face her before pulling out the make-up kit she always carried around with her. Covering the top of her liquid foundation bottle with her pinky, she shook the bottle a couple of times to properly coat the tip of her finger, before moving to start dabbing and smoothing the foundation over the dark spots under Allison’s eyes, looking intently at her work and ignoring the flabbergasted expression Allison was currently wearing.

 

Once the hunter looked more like normal and less like she had stayed up the past few weeks in a traumatized and grieving insomnia, Lydia washed her hands and put away her kit, beginning to pull and tug at the clips and bobby pins holding up Allison’s hair.

 

“Oh, sweetie,” Lydia said, her voice speaking of her mourning over Allison’s beautiful long curls, “if you’re going to go all Jo March, at least go to a professional, huh? Not everyone can neatly cut their hair like Disney characters. Did you actually take a dagger to your hair?”

 

“Dagger and then scissors when the dagger wasn’t cutting fast enough,” Allison admitted, and Lydia gave her a look that spoke of both sympathy and ‘are you crazy, girl’. “Is it really bad?”

 

“Well,” Lydia tugged at the uneven strands, running her fingers through it and examining it like it was a math equation, “it’s pretty bad. But not so bad that I can’t fix it, I think. Let me just grab some scissors from one of the staff members. Stay right here, don’t move – I’ll only be a second.”

 

She turned on her heel and promptly walked out, approaching someone dressed in the T-shirt that designated a manager. “Excuse me, sir,” she started, giving her best award-winning smile. The man stopped, looking at her expectantly with a slightly shocked expression, as if he had never had a pretty girl smile at him before. “I need a pair of scissors – little emergency, nothing too vital. Do you have any?”

 

“Uh, I think I do – in my office,” the man stumbled over his words he tried to get them out so quickly, before he turned and went back the way he had just come from. A minute later, he came back with the scissors and handed them to Lydia. She smiled, carefully making sure she didn’t touch him (because his hands looked sweaty and he in general looked greasy) before going back to the bathroom to see Allison exactly where she had left her.

 

“Excellent, let’s start fixing up this mess. Get into the handicap stall, you need to sit down and I need enough room to walk around.” She pushed Allison to the biggest stall in the bathroom, forcing her to sit down on the toilet once they had covered the lid with toilet paper. Snipping the scissors once, she came down on Allison’s head like a vulture on a corpse, snipping and clipping quickly and precisely.

 

“Where are you and your dad going?”

 

“Kansas,” Allison said softly, looking down at her hands as Lydia moved around her, fixing the damage she had done in a moment of frustration and pain. “Dad’s going there to meet some other hunters – he’s, uhm. He’s telling them that the Argent family, what remains of us anyway, is not going to be hunting…hunting werewolves anymore.” She winced, and Lydia tweaked her ear, reprimanding her for moving while she was cutting. “Sorry.”

 

“Is that an apology for almost making me cut off your ear, or for keeping the fact that your family is a family of hunters and that werewolves are actually real a secret from me until things got way too out of control to properly fix?”

 

Lydia pulled back to stare at Allison, and the girl had the decency to look like she regretted ever having made that choice in the first place. Taking another moment to coolly look down at her friend, she went back on her Save Allison’s Hair mission.

 

“I want you to tell me everything, Allison – I hate not knowing things. I need to know everything; I need to know what’s going on around me. Especially when it involves me in a really big way.” She paused, then, pulling back and looking at Allison’s hair critically before nodding at her handiwork, putting aside the scissors and starting on making tiny French braids all along Allison’s head, keeping them in place with the other girl’s bobby pins and hair clips.

 

“We didn’t think you had to know,” Allison started, looking up at Lydia as if desperately hoping the other girl would understand. “We thought we could take care of everything – that your involvement was done! We didn’t know what was happening with you and Peter Hale –”

 

“Well you would have if any of you had listened to me when I tried to talk to you,” Lydia snapped, tugging on Allison’s hair somewhat viciously. The darker haired girl winced and Lydia sighed, smoothing out her hair and rubbing at the spot apologetically before going back to her task. “Look, you had your reasons – idiotic as they were – but you had them. And I suppose I can’t blame you for that. Just please, do this one thing for me. Actually _tell me_ what’s going on with this town and my boyfriend. Okay?”

 

The two stared at each other for a very long moment, before Allison nodded and Lydia smiled – an actual smile, full of relief and pleasure.

 

“The beginning, please.”

 

~+~

 

They spent the rest of the morning in the diner, sitting at a corner booth and talking quietly together over pancakes and bacon and eggs.

 

Allison would speak between bites, explaining things as best as she understood them and answering any of Lydia’s questions as in-detail as she could. She didn’t have all the answers, of course – Allison was a human and a hunter, and Lydia wanted to know about werewolves because apparently Jackson was one – but she knew enough to placate the girl who had been left out.

 

Lydia barely ate her food, however, pushing it around on her plate and looking at it with the distrustful eye of someone used to eating at restaurants and cafés slightly more high-class than the diner she found herself in. It was the only expression she had learned from her father, and one that, had she know about it, she would have worked on immediately to get rid of.

 

At one point in their conversation, Allison brought Lydia’s lack of eating up.

 

“Do you not like it? I mean, I know this isn’t your favourite place, but it’s pretty decent all things considered. And today’s bacon is done perfectly.”

 

“I’m sure it’s lovely,” Lydia said, smiling thinly and pushing her plate towards Allison without another word, “but I really am not all that hungry. Maybe it was the story of how you, Stiles and Jackson set Peter Hale on fire.”

 

Allison winced, looking at the other girl apologetically, before taking her plate and eating her food as well. It seemed as though Allison hadn’t eaten for weeks, at the very least. Had her appetite dropped after everything? Oh, probably. But she’d only looked tired, not thinner, when Lydia had seen her first…

 

“I’ll pay,” Lydia said, standing up after watching Allison finish two plates of a full breakfast. It was practically nauseating, and she needed to leave suddenly. “You leave this weekend, right?”

 

“Yeah,” Allison nodded, wiping her mouth with a napkin and looking up at her with her wide eyes. “I think it’s best if we do leave – there’s way too much of everything here. But I’ll miss you.”

 

“Aren’t you coming back for school?”

 

“I’m not sure,” Allison admitted with a frown, standing up and pulling on her leather jacket. She looked less of a miserable wreck than she had when they met up; talking about everything seemed to be as much of a healing experience as it was an informative experience for Lydia. “We could write e-mails to one another, though?”

 

Lydia stared at her friend for a very long moment, seeing her in the new light of hunter, motherless daughter, and distraught ex-girlfriend to a werewolf. She then smiled, a little sincere and a little fake, and nodded.

 

“Definitely.”

 

Lydia went up to pay, the two girls walking out after everything was financially settled. Allison wrapped her arms around Lydia after a brief, awkward pause when they were figuring out how to say goodbye.

 

It felt like the right thing to do, but at the same time Lydia felt like something was wrong. She ignored her feeling and hugged the other girl tight, resting her chin on the slightly taller Allison’s shoulder. They pulled away when it was deemed socially acceptable, Lydia reaching out and fixing Allison’s hair carefully before nodding.

 

“Don’t take another pair of scissors to your hair; just shoot things,” she said with an eyebrow ticked towards her hairline. Allison smiled sheepishly, shrugging and rubbing the side of her neck, before nodding. “Alright. Have a good trip, and I hope to see you in the new school year. I expect an e-mail from you three days after you get to Kansas, though, you hear me? If I don’t, I will be very cross, and we wouldn’t want that, right?”

 

“Of course not, Lydia,” Allison agreed, smiling and pulling back completely. “Thanks for the emergency hair-mending and for being so understanding. I’ll talk to you soon.”

 

The dark haired teenager went back to her car, looking a lot more at peace than she had when she had first appeared at the diner, hair a self-made mess and face borderline skeletal. Lydia watched her get into her car and drive away, her mind going over everything she had just learned, before she turned and made her way towards the public library.

 

She had a book of folk and fairytales to find.

 

~+~

 

“‘A slut is she who eats the flesh and drinks the blood of her grandmother,’” Lydia murmured, curling up in the old, cushy armchair that the library had for people to do just as she did. It was a strange line in _The Story of Grandmother_ , one just spoken by a flyaway character that was probably important in the oral telling but not so much in the written word. It didn’t even hold overall importance to the story, outside of maybe telling a twisted moral.

 

But it stood out to her. She just did not know _why_.

 

Finishing the story, she closed the anthology she had managed to dig up, unfolding herself from the chair and tucking the anthology under her arm. Picking up her purse, strap over her shoulder and bag resting against her hip, she made her way to the front desk and flashed her library card to the old woman behind the counter, giving her a sweet smile.

 

“Mind if I take this one out?” she asked cordially, handing the anthology over so that the librarian could stamp the date of check-out and the due date onto the card in the back. It was an older system, one that Lydia liked because it was a system that worked. Computers were so touchy, and information could be lost within the ether so quickly. Paper and ink and the trust between the library and the lender were as familiar and comforting as her mother’s absence and her shower routine.

 

“Doing your usual summer reading, Miss Martin?” the old librarian asked her voice creaky and faint, like a fading, dusty rocking chair. Lydia nodded, leaning against the counter as she watched the process the librarian went through; gnarled old hands moving swiftly in a routine memorized years and years and years ago. Lydia wondered when the librarian had first started working at the library, since her mother had told her once that she remembered her as a young girl moving to America for the first time with big plans for her future.

 

“You’re a good girl, Lydia Martin,” the woman said, then, handing her the book and giving her a tired smile. “No matter what all those vultures call you and say about you, you’re a good girl and I want you to remember that.”

 

Lydia stared at her with surprise, slowly taking the book back from the old woman. She then gave her a small, timid smile, clutching the anthology to her chest. The old librarian patted her hand twice, her eyes sweet and wise.

 

Lydia left without another word, mind on throwaway sentences and surprising sentiments.

 

~+~

 

On the 18 of July, a week after Allison had left Beacon Hills with her father and a week after Lydia’s mother announced Grandmère’s upcoming visit, Jackson finally responded to one of Lydia’s texts.

 

She was deep into reading the third version of Little Red Riding Hood that was in the anthology; the Grimm Brothers’, to be exact, when the text alert sounded on her bed. She looked up from her reading, seeing her phone flash on before dimming down again to save power. Marking her place with a bookmark, she pulled herself away from the corner she had settled into it, picking up her phone and sliding up the lock screen to see what the message said.

 

_Meet me in the park at 3. –Jackson_

She glanced at her clock, seeing the glowing numbers tell her it was twenty-five minutes to 3. That should be plenty of time.

 

She quickly fluffed out her hair, redid her make-up, and checked her appearance, grabbing her purse and her house keys as she set out from the house. She did not even bother telling Evangelie that she was heading out, because Evangelie probably wouldn’t have pretended to care; she was paying bills, and that was a Very Important Matter.

 

The park was fifteen minutes away from the Martin house on foot, and if Lydia sped-walked it would only take her ten. However, she took her time on her way there, not wanting to appear needy or over-excited about the fact that Jackson had finally contacted her after such a long radio silence between the two of them. She supposed it made sense, in a way: Jackson needed time to get used to the fact that he was A) alive and B) a werewolf. Trying to mend things with Lydia with so much already going on would probably cause him to turn caustic in defense.

 

That would just be counterproductive.

 

Twenty minutes later, she got to the park and went directly to the swings, as that was where Jackson and she usually had their talks when they met up here. She thought it was pretty fitting for the two of them, really; their personalities were pendulums, and sometimes they were pleasant and then other times they’d swing back into volatile. It was a neat piece of symbolism, really, and she rather liked it.

 

Three minutes later, when Lydia had gotten a good swing going, Jackson appeared on the swing next to her and pushed back against the gravel to catch up with her.

 

“I’ve been out of state,” he said after a moment, eyes facing forward and expression unusually tense. Lydia looked over at him carefully, noting the tick in his jaw, and waited for him to talk again. He finally caught up to her height when he did. “I actually flew over to Georgia as soon as the summer started.”

 

“What’s in Georgia?”

 

“My grandparents,” Jackson said, and he suddenly let go of the swing’s chains and flew up into the air. He collapsed to the ground with a child’s elegance, standing up and dusting his knees off of dirt and gravel before looking over at Lydia. Lydia stopped pumping her legs, slowing down so that she could eventually skid to a halt.

 

“I thought your grandparents lived up in Washington,” she said, standing up once she could and walking over to him. She stood in front of him in a defensive stance: arms crossed over her chest, shoulders curved inwards as if she were hiding in a shell. Jackson stood in an equally defensive manner, with his arms stiff at his sides and his feet spread apart as if preparing himself for an assault.

 

“My _real_ grandparents,” Jackson said, his voice dropping into a fervor it always developed whenever he learned something about his _real_ parents or anything about his _real_ family. Sometimes Lydia pitied the Whittemores, for they really did love Jackson and they did everything to make him happy. But the moment Jackson learned he was some kind of foundling, he was obsessed about finding out where he really, truly belonged. “They live in Georgia.”

 

“How did you find out about them?”

 

“The Whittemores told me,” Jackson said shrugging. He walked over to the merry-go-round, leaning on the rusted metal bars before stepping up onto the platform. He started to push himself with one foot when Lydia dumped her purse on the ground nearby, grabbed the bar behind him, and started to push him herself. He let her, tilting his head back as the momentum built up and a breeze developed to cool him down in the hot summer air. “They decided that it was time they told me _something_ , so they told me about my grandparents. They’re all that’s left of my mom’s side of the family.”

 

“What are they like?”

 

“German,” Jackson said, smiling a little and, tightening his grip on his bar, leaned back so that it felt like he was falling. Lydia was running by then, and she finally let go, stumbling back and watching Jackson spin ‘round and ‘round and ‘round. She smiled as she watched him relax for a moment, looking younger and more like his old self than he had for the last half a year. “They’re Catholics who helped hide Jews in their cellar during the war. They’re really old, and only my gran - she asked me to call her ‘oma’, and I guess that means ‘grandmother’ or something – can speak any kind of English. It’s really broken English, too, so it was interesting trying to talk to them. Didn’t help that my granddad, or ‘opa’, was pretty much deaf.”

 

“Did you like them?” Lydia asked, watching as the merry-go-round finally started to slow down. She stepped forward, grabbing onto the bar and pulling it back to force it to a stop. Jackson straightened, looking out over the park in contemplation, before he turned back to Lydia and shrugged a shoulder.

 

“I’m glad I met them. I feel like I understand a bit more about myself, now. That’s all I’ve ever really wanted.”

 

Lydia nodded, walking back to get her purse. Slinging the strap over her shoulder, she turned around to see Jackson walking towards her. His expression was easier, now, after talking about whatever it was he was talking about. She had a feeling he said a lot more than what it seemed like. When he stopped in front of her, Lydia held out her hand, waiting to see what he would do. Jackson looked down at her hand, and then back up to her face and her eyes, narrowing his own blue eyes that glowed so brilliantly now on hers.

 

Jackson grabbed her hand and led her back to his Porsche to take her out to an early dinner and then a movie, and everything almost felt normal again.

 

She kept to herself how hot his hand was.

 

~+~

 

For the rest of July, Lydia spent her time with Jackson.

 

They didn’t have to pay attention to one another constantly when they were together, so Lydia could read through her summer booklist and Jackson could look up his genealogy on his mother’s side to try and learn more about his family and who he was.

 

They developed a sort of routine, really, which Lydia appreciated and Jackson played along with. When they were at Jackson’s place, Jackson would grab his laptop, climbing onto his bed, allow Lydia to stretch her feet onto his lap, and then set his computer down on top of her shins and work like that. When they were at Lydia’s, they would share the large armchair in the library room, Lydia reading aloud from her book and Jackson listening while looking through websites on his iPhone. It was a comfortable setup, and one both of them agreed they liked.

 

However, when Jackson had learned about Lydia’s other routines he became more worried about her than he had ever allowed himself to be in the past.

 

“Lydia, you used to like it when we showered together,” he said one day, leaning against the wall opposite of his bathroom. He looked the strawberry-blonde over once and then twice, trying to see if she was hiding anything from him. They were mending, but there were still some trust issues on both ends: on Jackson’s because he thought Lydia would eventually leave him for all the shit that had happened; on Lydia’s because she thought that Jackson would try and push her away again.

 

It wasn’t healthy, but they were getting better.

 

“Well, then you broke up with me and we didn’t anymore,” Lydia said primly, tucking a wet strand of hair behind her ear and looking up at him with wide, guileless eyes. His frown deepened, eyes narrowing suspiciously. “What?”

 

“What’s going on, Lydia? Something’s different.”

 

“Well,” Lydia said, reaching forward and patting his chest lightly three times, “you’re a werewolf and I’m apparently immune to the bite! For whatever reason. So. That’s quite obviously different.” She smiled, then, walking passed him and disappearing into his bedroom, closing the door firmly to let him know she was getting dressed and if he tried to step in while she was getting dressed she would happily skin his werewolf hide and make it into a throw rug.

 

Rubbing his nose and sniffing once, smelling nothing off but the lingering scent of soap and something dusty, Jackson stepped into the bathroom and closed the door.

 

~+~

 

It was August 12 when Things Happened.

 

Lydia was at home, getting ready to go to the library to return a book by Don DeLilo called _White Noise_ when her phone started ringing.

 

Looking down at it, she paused when she saw Jackson’s name before picking it up and answering on the third ring.

 

“What is it?”

 

_“Have you heard about what happened the other day?”_

 

Lydia frowned, chewing on the corner of her lip as she thought about what could have happened the other day, before shrugging and grabbing DeLilo’s book and her purse, making her way out of her room and her house. Her mother wasn’t even home, today, and Lydia wondered for a moment if her mother would ever have time for her again.

 

“No, what happened?”

 

_“The librarian’s in the hospital.”_

 

“What?” Lydia stopped just outside of her house, her eyes wide in shock of hearing this news. “What’s wrong with her, do you know? I was just about to go to the library to drop off my book…”

 

_“I know, that’s why I thought I’d call you. I was just there myself to see if I could find something. Apparently she’s been feeling less and less energetic, and yesterday she just collapsed. Like all her energy was gone.”_

 

Lydia felt something cold settle in her stomach, her throat drying shortly afterwards, and she turned on her heel marching the opposite way of the library.

 

“I’m going to go visit her.”

 

 _“I thought you might,_ ” Jackson said with a tone that spoke of fondness and exasperation. He suddenly hung up, and Lydia looked over to the road to see a familiar Porsche roll up beside her. The passenger door opened and Jackson leaned towards her slightly with an impatient look. “Are we going or what?”

 

Lydia stared at him for a long moment, wondering why he was doing something like this, before giving him a tiny smile and slipping into the passenger seat. She shut the door carefully, setting her book and her purse neatly on her lap and strapping herself in. Once she was secure, Jackson pulled back onto the road, heading towards the hospital. At one point they saw Stiles’ familiar crap blue jeep rolling onto a street towards the grocery story that was usually empty at this time of day, but paid no attention to him as they had more important things on their minds.

 

Well, at least Lydia did.

 

Jackson pulled up in front of the hospital a little while later, letting Lydia hop out before going to find a parking spot. She walked through the automatic doors, feeling a chill settle into the base of her spine as she walked the familiar hallways of the hospital.

 

She hadn’t been to the hospital since she ran away, and so it was like returning after all that time. She thought for a moment that everyone was looking at her, waiting for her to have a mental breakdown or a moment of panic; be the town whackjob that she had become. But instead she held her head high, pushed her feeling of panic to the back of her mind, and walked right up to the desk where Melissa McCall sat typing into her computer and sipping tiredly at a mug of what seemed to be hot coffee – black, for maximum caffeine.

 

It took a moment for her to realize Lydia was there.

 

“Oh! Lydia – Lydia Martin! Gosh, it’s been a while, huh?” Melissa smiled, crossing her arms over the desk and looking up at her pleasantly. She really did seem like a kind woman, and intelligent; Lydia sometimes wondered how it was that Scott had come from this woman. Perhaps he got his academic abilities from his father.

 

(Not to say that Scott McCall was _stupid_ , as he was not. That was made obvious by his ability to create a workable plan, at any rate. But Scott McCall was also not _bright_ , was in fact a bit _dull_ , and that stood out to Lydia more than his strategic intelligence.)

 

“It has been, Ms McCall, though I think that’s probably a good thing all things considered.” She smiled politely, brushing back a loose curl over her shoulder and leaning against the counter that separated them. “I’m looking for the librarian’s room – Mrs Strauss, she came in yesterday?”

 

“Oh, yes, the poor woman,” Melissa sighed, her happy expression fading a little. Lydia was impressed she had been able to keep it up for so long. “She’s just down this hallway in room 225.”

 

“Thank you, Ms McCall,” Lydia murmured, turning from the woman and moving down the hallways immediately. She found the door, looked around to make sure no one was going to come in while she was there, and pushed open the door, stepping into the room.

 

The old librarian lay out on the bed, looking thinner and paler and older than Lydia had ever seen her before. She was staring at the television above her bed listlessly, but it was not on any channel; just the gray fuzz of a channel she didn’t get, white noise crawling through the room and into Lydia’s ears.

 

She walked over to the bed and tapped on the metal pole that kept the woman from rolling out three times.

 

Moving slowly, as if there was no energy left in her body, Mrs Strauss turned to look at Lydia. There was a look of recognition – but nothing else.

 

“Miss Martin,” the old woman rasped, attempting a smile before allowing it to drop. Lydia smiled weakly back, pulling the visitor’s chair over to her bedside and sitting down on it. The librarian did not take her eyes off of Lydia. “It is good…to see you.”

 

“You, too,” Lydia said softly, automatically speaking quietly in a hospital room as that is what a person does. Even if it was loud and noisy in the halls, as soon as you entered a room you started to speak in quiet tones and whispers. “How’re you feeling, Mrs Strauss?”

 

“Starved,” Mrs Strauss said softly, looking up at Lydia with eyes that saw something far beyond what was in front of her. “Sweet child; good Lydia Martin…I feel _starved_.”

 

Lydia stared at her for a long moment, watching as she seemed to grow thinner and weaker in front of her, before the machines the old woman was connected to started to beep and shrill and shriek. Nurses rushed into the room, and Melissa McCall ushered Lydia out of the room just as Jackson came into the hallway.

 

“What’s going on?”

 

“Mrs Strauss is falling into critical – I’m sorry, Lydia, Jackson, but I’m going to have to ask you both to leave. You can come back again once Mrs Strauss is stabilized.” Melissa gave them an apologetic smile before she turned back to the room Lydia had just been in. Jackson frowned, looking ticked off that they were being turned away, before looking down at Lydia.

 

“Lydia?”

 

Lydia did not seem to hear him, her arms wrapped around her stomach as she watched the nurses work over the old woman to try and bring her back to stable. That cold feeling that had settled inside her spread throughout her limbs, and she felt numb all over.

 

But the empty feeling she had been feeling for the whole day since she had heard Mrs Strauss was in the hospital was _gone_.

 

And that scared her.

 

That well and truly scared her.

 

~+~

 

It was the next day that Lydia heard about Stiles’ car accident.

 

It was why Jackson had taken so long in coming into the hospital. Someone had sent him a text – Scott or Isaac or both, Lydia wasn’t sure, but the three of them had begun talking after everything had happened weeks and weeks and weeks ago – telling him how Stiles had accidentally T-boned a guy. The guy had driven through a stop sign, so it wasn’t like Stiles did it on purpose or he was driving recklessly. Stiles was okay.

 

The guy was dead.

 

At first Lydia had felt some concern for her classmate. He would text her three times a day: once to apologize for yelling at her; once to ask how she was; and once to wish her a good night. It was irritating, but at the same time it was kind of sweet, because she knew these weren’t texts with the intention to get on her good side. Stiles was not being persistent in his affections for her, he was just genuinely being a nice guy and trying to mend whatever relationship they _had_ had. And she liked to think that they had been becoming friends. Stiles would be a good friend to have, Lydia thought; he was smart and he was funny, and he understood her like no one else in the school did. Even more than her parents; even more than Allison. Even more than _Jackson_ , and that was saying something.

 

So yes, she wanted to be Stiles’ friend, but his behaviour towards her after the lacrosse game when he had been beaten by that geriatric psycho sent them back quite a bit, because Lydia would not stand abuse by the men in her life anymore, and if Stiles was just going to be another father or another Jackson-who-had-broken-her-heart, then she was going to have nothing to do with him.

 

However, after a while, that concern turned into outright worry, as Stiles had stopped texting her altogether. And while that meant fewer texts to be ignored, it also meant an eerie radio silence that made her wonder what was going through the other genius’ ADHD head.

 

So a week and a half after Mrs Strauss fell into critical condition (she was now in a coma and not expected to make it; whenever she heard this, Lydia’s throat would dry out) and Stiles’ car accident, Lydia decided that it was about time she checked on the teenage boy.

 

So, dressed as pristinely and perfectly as she always made herself dress, for Lydia Martin had an image she had to uphold and nothing would cause her to break away from that image, not even running about the woods naked and scared out of her mind, Lydia left her house and started towards the Stilinski household.

 

Everyone knew where the sheriff lived, as it was a quaint house with pale window shutters and a garden that Mrs Stilinski had once kept pristine. After her fight with cancer that eventually lead to her death, the garden was left to rot, and all that was left of it was rotting trellises, dried rose bushes with brittle thorns, and the occasional poppies that grew around the death and decay. Lydia had always admired the poppies in the Stilinski garden, if only because they were stronger than they appeared to last so long in a garden of death.

 

Lydia stepped up to the doorway and knocked on the door three times. 

 

After a couple of minutes, Stiles answered the door.

 

He looked just as he usually did, outside of his outfit of sweatpants and a T-shirt that obviously needed a good washing. Feet bare and hand currently pushing his shirt up to scratch at his stomach, Lydia noted that he was actually pretty fit for looking so lanky and thin. She watched as he finally seemed to realize who was at his door.

 

“Uh.” Yes, that seemed very Stiles of him. She waited for another moment, wondering when he was going to invite her inside like a polite host. When he failed to do so, Lydia rolled her eyes and pushed passed Stiles, walking into the house, heels clicking loudly on the hardwood. She looked around, taking note of family pictures, a pizza box left by the recycle box that was shoved guiltily against the wall, and shoes messily piled in the front foyer. It was a gross amount of disorganization, but she really didn’t expect much else. “Hi?”

 

“Hello, Stiles,” she said, turning back to look at him for a moment to see that he was standing behind her. She looked around some more, spotting the game he had obviously been playing on the living room television screen. Something with guns and explosions and aliens; she recognized it from when Jackson played it at his house when he wasn’t researching. She finally turned back to Stiles, fully facing him. “I heard you were in an accident?”

 

Stiles nodded, his expression finally leaving ‘stupidly surprised’ and into a more familiar look. Stiles expressed with an elastic face, so sometimes his expression looked forced or overdone. She knew he did that to hide something, though; grief, probably, because he wasn’t like that in elementary school.

 

(She remembered the day Stiles came to school with a shaved head and calling himself Stiles. For a while she had stuck to calling him Gilt, because ‘Stiles’ was such a stupid name; but Stiles had looked at her with tears in his eyes and a tremble to his lips, and she’d immediately realized there was a _reason_ for his change in name and look and attitude, and so she had begun to call him Stiles, as he wished. This had been in the third grade. Shortly afterwards, Stiles announced to the playground that he was in love with Lydia Martin.

 

Lydia had pushed him into the sandbox, told him he had cooties, and ran away to the slide.)

 

“Oh, yeah, a little over a week ago,” Stiles spoke up dragging her out of her memories. She looked up in time to see him shrug as if it was not a big deal. It gave her pause, wondering at his reaction to the crash and the death that followed it. He walked around her, moving towards the kitchen and beginning to take things out of the fridge and the cupboards. The beginnings of a grilled cheese sandwich, it looked like. Lydia’s stomach clenched and she wondered for a moment if there was a pattern here. “I’m fine, if that’s why you came over.”

 

“Yes, I can see that,” Lydia said quietly, eyes narrowing in thought. She looked at Stiles closely, then, trying to see if there was anything different about him. He was thinner than normal, but she had noticed that when she had come see him after the game so many weeks ago. He was also paler, with darker shadows under his eyes; she didn’t think he’d appreciate her make-up tips like Allison had. But he still seemed as energetic as usual. Maybe a little quieter; maybe a little more somber. It worried her. This was not the Stiles she knew.

 

“I didn’t think you’d actually be _hurt_ – I mean, that crappy jeep of yours has to be good for something. But you’ve been quieter lately. I haven’t even gotten one text from you, and I know you send me one once a day either to apologize, tell me I’m beautiful, or wish me a good night. Sweet, but a tad annoying.”

 

Stiles smiled thinly, then, and she definitely knew something was wrong. Whatever had happened lately had Changed Stiles.

 

“Oh? Hah, I guess you’re glad I’ve stopped then, huh?”

 

“No,” Lydia said primly, walking into the kitchen and ignoring the almost obnoxious sound of her heels. “It’s a bit troubling, really,” because honesty was the best policy with Stiles, and she wanted him to know she was being sincere just then, “I mean, you’re not the type to just give up on something, even when you know it’s impossible to get – yet you’ve totally stopped trying to get on my good side.” She looked up at him again, pinning him with an analytical stare and demanding without words that he explain himself.

 

Stiles smiled, shrugging and looking vague and distracted. “I’m not emotionally traumatized, if that’s what you’re wondering. I’ve just been keeping to myself for a few days, that’s all. Scott comes home in a few days, and Allison and her dad after that,” she knew that, they had been e-mailing like they had promised and Allison had confirmed that they were coming back to Beacon Hills before school started, “though technically I shouldn’t know that, so I have to prepare for the nightly phone calls from my best friend saying how much he misses Allison and how much he hopes things get cleared up this year so they can finally go out in peace. Grabbin’ a bit of me-time, ya know?”

 

She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes in contemplation, looking at Stiles for a long moment before humming vaguely and looking away from him. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. A believable story, to be true – but something seemed off about it all the same. “…Well, alright then,” she murmured, before pinning another demanding glare on him. “But you better get back to normal soon; you’re the only constant thing in my life right now.”

 

This was, sadly, true. For when Lydia’s parents divorced, Stiles was still the weird kid in school; when Lydia had to decide which house she was going to stay in, Stiles was around to bother her and make her smile when he wasn’t looking. When Jackson broke up with Lydia, Stiles was there, the same. When Lydia was going through those nightmares and hallucinations, Stiles was always in the background, and always flailing and squalling and freaking out, even if she never knew why. He offered to listen to her when no one else did, even if he didn’t actually listen to her (but he probably had werewolf problems and yeah, her hallucinations were scary and important, but werewolf problems seem to be immediate). He helped her when she needed it most, even after he yelled at her.

 

Stiles was the one constant in her life. If they were close enough, Lydia would even probably consider him her best friend.

 

She kind of wanted to.

 

Swallowing back a moment of emotions she didn’t want to handle at the moment, she cleared her throat, hugged herself, and shook her head, looking back to the teenage boy. “Could I have a glass of water?”

 

“Sure – I’m making some grilled cheese, too, if you’d like?”

 

The thought of food made her feel sick, and she definitely knew there was a pattern here somewhere. Lydia did not have an eating disorder, but it sure felt like it lately.

 

“Oh, no thanks,” she shook her head, giving him a brief smile when he handed her the glass and taking a long swallow from it. She felt a little better; her throat was less dry, and her stomach wasn’t reacting so strongly. “I’m on a diet.”

 

“But you’re perfect!”

 

And there was Lydia’s Stiles – foolish and complimentary and meaning the best. Though she could tell there was less romance to it these days. That was wonderful.

 

“Yes, well,” she said flippantly, playing along for the first time since grade school, “even perfections can have improvements.”

 

“Nonsense,” Stiles said with a tone that said he knew just what they were doing; playing around, being kids, and she appreciated it. She was thrown for a moment when he looked at her and she saw an old man’s eyes – older than any eyes she had ever seen before. Eyes as old as time, and she wondered for a moment if he saw the same thing in her as Mrs Strauss had seen before she fell into critical.

 

He went back to normal very quickly, however, and she relaxed and pushed the thoughts aside for another time. “Finished your summer reading?”

 

She laughed, shaking herself out of the disturbed moment and concentrating on the now and the harmless. She nodded, holding her glass of water in steady, perfectly manicured hands. “I’m finishing up with Morrison’s _Beloved_.”

 

“Oh? I haven’t read that one – what’s it about?”

 

And it was nice, for a moment, to talk to someone with the same interests as her. And again, Lydia wondered if she and Stiles could ever become best friends.

 

“Well,” she started, recalling the book she had just finished, “there’s this woman called Sethe…”

 

~+~

 

Allison came back to Beacon Hills shortly after Stiles’ and Lydia’s meeting, and Lydia spent more time around Allison and Jackson in the last few weeks of summer.

 

When school started the first week of August, she kept to her usual crowd, playing up the popular role and sticking to Jackson’s side as she had always done. The only difference now was that their relationship wasn’t so PDA and so caustic, which people definitely noticed. They were quieter, and more careful around each other. Lydia didn’t like it when Jackson wrapped his arms around her waist, and Jackson didn’t like it when Lydia touched his bare skin.

 

Jackson was still too hot, even for a werewolf, and she knew this to be true as she had bumped into Isaac and Scott purposely during school to make sure. When she brought it up with Jackson during the break between her Advanced French class and her AP English, Jackson just brushed her off and told her he was dealing with some things; that if it became serious, he’d tell her. She knew he probably wouldn’t, but at least he said he’d try. That was improvement.

 

During English, Stiles had cornered her by taking Ethan’s usual seat, asking her about Jackson’s strange heat. She brushed him off as best as she could, though, not wanting to think about it too much. Stiles had other things to worry about, and Lydia was still trying to figure out what was wrong with her.

 

When Jefferson died on the lacrosse field in Stiles’ arms, she was one of the people to visit him in the hospital – forcing Jackson to buy a get well card and leave it on the side table for his teammate and the one person who understood her. And when Stiles had come back to school, she helped to distract his thoughts from the upsetting death by looking over his school work and helping him with it, teasing him in a clipped manner that she knew he would understand and appreciate.

 

Things were going alright for her after that, though she still noticed something off about herself and the people around her. She noticed that people seemed to eat more when she sat at their table; people would crave touch more if she brushed against their shoulders; people would crave physical attention from their partners if she happened to be physical with Jackson in the hallway, like kissing him or hugging him. Her mother was becoming more and more distant, as if avoiding her and Lydia was oddly glad about the distance. She knew her mother was safe from whatever was happening with her.

 

It only made sense, then, for the first big lacrosse game of the season to be when Things Happened.

 

She was sitting in the bleachers with Allison, cheering on Scott and Isaac and Jackson and Stiles, when the lights went out. Unlike last time, Lydia did not scream – though Allison did, because she had never experienced a lacrosse field blackout. She allowed the girl to cling to her arm, ignoring the empty feeling in her gut when the girl wrapped her fingers around her wrist, watching what was happening around her and on the field. She saw the three wolves lead Stiles off the field and towards the locker room, and thought that was the best.

 

She decided they needed to move, too.

 

“Allison,” she said, breaking into Allison’s panicked babble. She didn’t know what was happening, if there was danger, and she didn’t have her arrows or her bow or any kind of weapon because she didn’t hunt these days – she was scared, so scared, and Lydia felt sorry for her. “We need to go somewhere safe, quickly. It’s probably wolves. I don’t know what kind, but Jackson’s told me a bit about the wolves around town – they’re dangerous. We’ve got to go. Scott and they are _fine_ – we need to be, too.”

 

So Allison nodded, because what Lydia said made sense, and the two girls clambered off of the bleachers and started towards the school. Lydia wanted to hide out in the chem lab where they could make Molotov cocktails easily in case they needed a quick defense.

 

They were caught before they could get there.

 

The last thing Lydia saw was Aiden’s sharp, dangerous, fang-filled grin.

 

~+~

 

Lydia had learned the difference between the twins Ethan and Aiden relatively quickly.

 

It had not been difficult, of course; they were identical in appearance, but that was where the identicalness ended. Where Ethan was cunning, sharp-witted, and brutally intelligent, Aiden was simpler, stronger, and terribly physical. Ethan joined the debate team and the mathematics team – both school activities Lydia finally felt comfortable doing for herself, with her friends and her boyfriend supporting her and her desire to be the _real_ Lydia for once. Aiden joined wrestling, track and field, and helped Coach Finstock carry around lacrosse equipment.

 

Ethan viewed her as an intellectual adversary. Aiden had a crush on her.

 

She knew Aiden had a crush on her by the way he acted around her; he would pose and strut like some kind of animal trying to impress a potential mate, or steal a female away from her current mate in this case. He was always watching her in the hallways and in gym class – the only class they shared together. He was always leaning against the bleachers she’d claimed while she watched lacrosse practice and yelled out encouragements to her favourite players.

 

Aiden was always there, and so Lydia knew him when she saw him.

 

When she woke up in a dark, dank room that smelt like moss, wet, rotting wood and ashes – and knew immediately she was in the ruins of Hale House, because she knew that smell from anywhere, it was burned into her nose for the rest of her _life_ – with someone tying up her wrists, it took her all of three seconds to figure out it was Aiden.

 

“You’re awake,” he said, not even bothering to look up at her as he carefully handled the rope he was using to tie her ankles together. She watched him with vague eyes, still disoriented from her sudden black-out. The back of her neck hurt and she wondered for a moment if Aiden had knocked her out by pinching into a nerve there. She thought she felt something sticky and flaky on her skin, as well, and that just peeved her off more than anything else. He better not have made her bleed on her sweater – it was _new_ , damn it.

 

“Where’s Allison?” she asked once she could work her jaw, looking around to try and spot the ex-hunter. Aiden huffed, rolling his eyes, before shifting and showing the unconscious dark haired girl slumped against the wall behind him. Her ankles and wrists were already bound, and she’d been stripped of her jacket and shoes – as if Aiden had checked to make sure she really wasn’t armed. Lydia relaxed a bit at the sight of her friend, but only for a moment. “What do you want with us?”

 

“Leverage,” Aiden said with a shrug, finishing off the knot at her ankles and picking up a length of rope for her wrists. He squatted, shuffling closer to her, and reached out to grab onto her sleeve, tugging her arms up so that he could tie her without hesitation. “Jackson and Scott will do anything to make sure you two are safe – so they’ll behave like good pups as long as we’ve got you trussed up like the Christmas pig.”

 

“I _really_ hope that’s not a comment on my looks, Aiden, I’d be hurt if it was.” Aiden snorted, glancing up at her with an amused grin, before he carefully started tying her up. He was being so gentle, and if he wasn’t tying her up she’d almost call him sweet. Almost.

 

“You know Chris Argent is going to have words with you for the way you’re treating his only daughter,” Lydia said conversationally, watching his hands, trying to calculate a way out of this mess. So far there were no positive results. “And by words, of course, I mean an arrow to your forehead.”

 

Aiden laughed, a short bark of sound, as he began knotting the rope around her wrists. She watched as he carefully handled the coarse rope, making sure that it did not rub against her skin. How considerate. “He can try,” he said after a moment, looking up at Lydia and grinning with a flash of red eyes. She shuddered, pushing her back against the wall behind her, and thought back on Peter Hale’s eyes as they glowed bright red before he tore into her with claws and teeth.

 

Her scar itched and burned.

 

“Do you have to tie me up, Aiden? Can’t we talk about this?” Lydia asked her voice still calm despite the panic crawling under her skin. Whether it was panic from her current situation or panic as thoughts of Peter Hale slowly took over her mind in this moment of weakness, the strawberry-blonde could not be sure. It was panic all the same, however, and Lydia hated the feeling of panic more than anything else.

 

She felt alone when she panicked.

 

“It’s orders, Lydia,” Aiden said, nose twitching as he worked. He paused and looked up at her after a particularly long inhale. “Could you calm down, please? Nothing’s gonna happen to you.”

 

“Look, I _can’t_ calm down,” Lydia hissed, grabbing onto his wrist as soon as he wasn’t paying attention. She dug her fingers into the soft underside of his wrist, watching as his eyes flickered red in irritation.

 

That empty feeling she had been experiencing more and more exploded in her stomach and spread throughout her entire body.

 

Lydia watched as Aiden’s eyes flickered again, his eyes widening and his teeth elongating into fangs. His face seemed thinner in that moment, and she could hear his ragged breathing; could see how he was trying to keep himself perfectly still. There were claws on his hands, she could feel them against her skin, and his flesh felt electric under her fingers.

 

He whined, the sound so animal she thought for a moment he really was just a dog and not a wolf-man, and then all of a sudden Aiden was tackled to the ground by the most unexpected person on the planet.

 

“What the hell did you do to him, Martin?” Erica Reyes demanded, holding the alpha down with thin arms that did not look like they could handle the tension. The blonde ex-epileptic seemed thinner than usual, with hollowed cheeks and dark smudges under her eyes. Her clothes were weeks and weeks and weeks old, the leather jacket she had taken to wearing near the time she had received the Bite in tattered rags and ripped up holes. Her jeans looked faded to extinction.

 

“I don’t know!” Lydia said back shrilly; not her finest moment but she thought she could be forgiven. “I’m too busy trying not to lose my shit because I was _kidnapped_ by a bunch of _werewolves_ and I only learned werewolves actually existed a few months ago! And where the hell have you been, Reyes, you became conspicuously missing at the end of the school year!”

 

Erica straddled the wolfing out alpha, pressing her meagre weight against him through her hips and her arms crossed over his chest, before turning her head to look at Lydia over her shoulder.

 

“Is this really the best time to be questioning my shoddy attendance record, Martin? And could you untie yourself any faster, I am a beta and I am a _weakened_ one at that.”

 

Lydia wrinkled her nose at the demanding tone but went to work on pulling loose the rope around her wrists at any rate. Once her hands were freed, she worked on her feet, quietly mourning her manicure and promising herself she’d get one this weekend to treat herself for once again dealing with an excessive amount of werewolf bullshit.

 

Peter Hale came bounding up the stairs when she was working on untying Allison’s feet.

 

“Well, well, well,” he murmured, his voice smooth and amiable and everything that made Lydia’s skin crawl. She ignored him as best as she could, bowing over her work and letting Erica growl at the stranger in warning. “What’s happening in here, then?”

 

“She managed to drive the alpha into nearly losing his control,” Erica said, grunting as Aiden bucked his hips, trying to throw her off of him. She tightened her grip on his hips with her knees, bearing down on him. “You smell like Derek – and like you’re rotting. Who the hell are you?”

 

“Tsk,” Peter sighed, shaking his head as he walked over to Erica and Aiden. “No tact, pup.”

 

He looked down at the alpha with contempt, before glancing once at Erica’s state and deciding that she was unfit to handle the werewolf. Bending down, he grabbed onto the younger alpha’s shirt. He then lifted him up so that his feet were dangling in the air and slammed his head into the newly rebuilt wall of what was going to be Isaac’s room. Aiden howled; the sound was cut off by Peter squeezing his throat quickly, before he took a corked bottle out of his pocket.

 

Holding his breath, he bit into the cork and pulled it out, holding the bottle under Aiden’s nose. A purple smoke drifted upwards, and Aiden rolled his eyes and passed out almost immediately. Peter allowed the young man to drop painfully to the ground before spitting out the cork and shoving it back onto the open lid of the bottle.

 

“Deacon is such a helpful man,” he murmured softly, pocketing his vaporized wolfsbane. He then turned away from Erica who he left sitting on the ground panting, making his way over to Lydia.

 

Lydia stood protectively in front of Allison and glared up at Peter.

 

“I never really noticed before, since I thought it was residue from my own charred skin,” Peter began thoughtfully, reaching out and coiling a loose strawberry-blonde curl around his index and middle fingers, “but sweet little Lydia…you smell of ashes.”

 

He stepped closer, bowing down and pressing his nose against her temple as if he were allowed. Lydia stiffened, feeling something sick coil in her stomach; a different kind of hollowness than what she had become used to, as if she were searching for something but could not find it.

 

She could feel Peter’s grin on her skin.

 

“‘A slut is she who eats the flesh’…”

 

“…‘and drinks the blood of her grandmother’,” Lydia finished, staring up at Peter with widening eyes. “How…”

 

Peter winked, stepping back just in time for Jackson and Isaac to appear in the room. Isaac whined at the sight of Erica, moving towards her immediately and wrapping around her as if she had been thought dead. For a moment, Lydia wondered that maybe she was.

 

Jackson stepped over to her, touching her cheek; his too-hot skin searing into her flesh soothingly, burning away any and all trace of Peter’s presence.

 

She collapsed into his arms and choked back on a panicked sob.

 

~+~

 

Jackson left on a cross-country trip the day before Grandmère Charbonneau finally came to Beacon Hills, and Lydia could not help but count her blessings.

 

Her mother did not ask about what happened during the lacrosse field blackout, or where she had been for when Lydia finally came home at midnight that night. She was too busy preparing the house for Grandmère’s approaching visit, papers and bills pushed aside for rearranging the living room furniture and buying fake fruit and flowers to make the place seem a little more decorated and ‘homey’ than its usual clinical, interior-decorator-designed set-up.

 

The next day, Evangelie went to the airport to pick up her mother, and Lydia went through her shower routine, scrubbing viciously at her hair and feet as if practically rubbing her skin off was going to rub away the touch and influence of Peter Hale.

 

She met with Grandmère perfectly pristine and smiling.

 

“ _Grandmère_ ,” she greeted, walking towards the stooped old woman with her hands outstretched. She stopped just before her Grandmère, obediently bowing down so that the old French woman could air kiss one cheek, and then the other. Lydia reciprocated and then hugged the woman’s shoulders, burying her face in the familiar shawl that Grandmère had been wearing since Lydia was a little girl.

 

“Who is this beautiful young lady before me?” Grandmère rhetorically asked, smiling widely and sincerely before making a motion for Lydia to step back and turn around so she could look at her granddaughter. Lydia moved back, spinning on one heel and holding her hands out as if she were a little girl showing off her pretty new party dress that mommy had just made. “Oh goodness, oh goodness, oh goodness, you’ve grown so well, my sweet.”

 

Lydia smiled, bowing her head shyly, before looking back up at her Grandmère. “I wanted to introduce my boyfriend, Jackson, but he’s off on a trip with his parents across the country.”

 

(The Whittemores were not at all part of Jackson’s trip, and Lydia knew this very well. But she also knew that Jackson needed alone time, and she was not going to intrude on that. Even if she really did need him around – if only for a little while until she could sleep peacefully again.)

 

“That’s quite alright,” Grandmère said with a wave of her hand. She shuffled over to the couch, sitting down on it. Evangelie fluttered around her mother for a moment before disappearing into the kitchen to get the tea tray and the tray of snack-like foods she’d spent the previous day making from scratch from Grandmère’s recipes. Lydia sat down next to the old woman, looking at her thoughtfully.

 

“Grandmère…”

 

“Hm?” The French woman looked over at Lydia, before narrowing her eyes and leaning towards her. “You look thinner, dear.”

 

“Ah?” Lydia blinked, looking down at herself and seeing no such thing. “I don’t think I’ve lost weight.”

 

“I do not mean physically, dear child.”

 

Lydia’s eyes widened and she latched onto that statement with desperate hands, mentally bringing it up to her mind’s eye and examining to from every conceivable angle she could think of. The emptiness she felt constantly now whenever she touched someone outside of Jackson (and Stiles); the way people reacted to her presence and to her touch; Peter’s comments on her scent; Grandmère’s comment just now.

 

“Grandmère,” she started again, staring down at her hands with widening eyes and an idea forming in her mind, “my mother is avoiding me because she sees what you see, isn’t she?”

 

The old woman was silent, before a heavy sigh answered her. She took that as the ‘yes’ that it was.

 

“Grandmère,” she said again, turning to look at the old woman to see that her Grandmère was watching her with eyes that said she had given up even trying to deny whatever it was Lydia was about to say, “you used to tell me stories as a child, didn’t you?”

 

Grandmère nodded. Lydia looked straight ahead.

 

“Did you tell me _The Story of Grandmother_?”

 

Another heavy sigh responded and Lydia wrapped her arms around her chest, hugging herself tightly. After a moment a withered, yet strong hand clasped her shoulder, squeezing and letting her know that Grandmère was still beside her.

 

“ _Why_?”

 

“It was a warning, my dear, dear, dear girl,” Grandmère said softly, pressing a kiss to Lydia’s hair. Never once touching her skin. Never _once_ touching _her_. “My sweet child.”

 

Lydia drew farther into herself even as her Grandmère petted her hair and her mother came back from the kitchen with the food and the tea, talking a mile a minute and accent slipping in strongly as she conversed with her mother.

 

She remembered what Grandmère used to call her, when she was a little girl in her party dresses and her Shirley Temple curls. She remembered being held in the lap of a strong, stately, beautiful older woman with eyes as bright as starlight, and she would play with her rings while Grandmère Charbonneau told her stories and sang her songs from the old country. And she’d call her something that not even her mother dared to call her.

 

 _Ma petite faim_.

 

My little _hunger_.

**Author's Note:**

> To be found in a completely different page - they were too long.


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